


The New North

by Miss_M



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Female Friendship, Gen, Post-Canon, Post-War, The North remembers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-12
Updated: 2017-07-12
Packaged: 2018-11-23 11:44:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11401749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: The North would have to adjust, whether it wanted to or not.





	The New North

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write something about these characters after ADWD, and about how the North would change as a result of the Winter War. I own nothing.

The great stable yard of Winterfell was full of churned mud, recently thawed, and kerchief-sized patches of snow left behind by Winter’s retreat. The air bit the throat and lungs with small, sharp teeth. Spring had settled in, and though it would continue to snow on and off for moons to come, the worst was in the past. 

Or so one hoped.

Leaning against the battlements above the yard, the stone still black from the long-ago fire, Alys drew big lungfuls, letting the springtime air fill her down to her toes, and shivered deliciously inside her cloak of bear pelt. She had left the black wolfskins the Magnar had gifted her for her nameday in her chamber. It would do no good to rile Winterfell’s touchy folk by wearing wolfskins during this, House Thenn’s first formal visit to the Starks’ ancestral home. 

By Alys’ side, Brienne of Tarth wore a soft jacket of spotted cat, deerskin breeches, and good boots. With all the spearwives settled south of the Wall, the tall southron attracted little attention, at least until she met lewd jests and offers of a bedding with her fists rather than parrying with a salacious jest of her own. 

Not for the first time, Alys considered the benefits of donning breeches while south of the Wall. She had had to abandon skirts when she had journeyed beyond the Frostfangs with the Magnar, across rugged terrain without roads, while the cold of many Winters, rooted deep in the mean and meager soil, had reached up to pinch at her legs, even through breeches lined with rabbit fur.

Alys chuckled at the thought of how the remaining old northern lords would react to the sight of Rickard Karstark’s daughter dressed alike as her wildling husband. 

Her chuckle failed to draw Brienne’s attention away from the shouting contest down in the yard. Several servitors of House Stark and other, visiting Houses old and new had drawn together into a knot, their voices raised in dispute. 

Men who had followed Stannis Baratheon, Mance Rayder, or Robb Stark – and, in some cases, two of those or even all three – stood chest to chest, shouting in each other’s faces. A motley image of the North after the war, still fighting battles long lost and made all but meaningless to anyone who had not been there, whose friends and brothers had not left their bones at Oxcross or the Weeping Water, the Wall or the Whispering Wood. 

“Say that again and I’ll bugger you dead, like we did your fire-worshipping king before you!”

“You’ll try, you uncouth savage! You’ve cast a spell over our good lady, or none of you’d still be here…”

The two loudest men were rehashing the relative merits of the Burning Stag against the Giantsbane. Alys noticed that Brienne of Tarth had dropped her right hand to the pommel of her sword, her broad back and shoulders tense as she evaluated whether it was worth leaving the battlements to descend into the fray and break up the incipient fight. Despite her own history, the woman who had defeated Stannis Baratheon in single combat would treat all the men shouting below alike. 

Alys had seen Brienne of Tarth best men in combat with sword, mace, and bare hands before. She raised her clear voice so it rang above the men’s noise, just loud enough to draw only her companion’s notice.

“Tormund Giantsbane, Lord of the Dreadfort,” Alys said, mocking in spite of herself. It was no small feat, living every day as both highborn lady and wife of a Magnar of the Thenn upjumped to a lord. “Tormund’s been talking about renaming that dread pile Tormundsfort. Lord Umber is threatening to break off Tormund’s betrothal to his daughter if he does. Tradition is important to Mors Umber, for all that he was little more than a brigand before.” 

Brienne of Tarth seemed to be ruminating on the words poised on her tongue. “Northmen have long memories,” she said at last. Her hand still rested on her sword – a plain one made in Winterfell’s forge, not the famous one with the lion pommel of which the smallfolk sang – but she seemed inclined to let the small war in the stable yard run its course uninterrupted. 

The North would have to adjust, whether it wanted to or not. Mostly not. Alys and Brienne both had been watching it resist change, clawing and screaming like a scalded cat. Peasants who had managed to survive the Winter War and Ramsay Snow’s bloody stewardship of the North still made the gesture to ward off evil when Alys’ husband rode past. Castle servants muttered about having to bow and scrape to wildling savages, and the remaining lords of the old North looked for any excuse to bring a grievance before the one Stark returned to Winterfell. For their part, freeholders newly settled in the Gift were becoming used to boundary markers and stone fences, while the new lords elevated from among the free folk grappled with tithes and taxes and lord’s rights, some with covetous glee, others with speculation about wages and freeing their peasants. 

Thinking on this, Alys replied more harshly than Brienne’s comment had warranted. “The North remembers nothing so well as its grievances. The old lords spat on Roose Bolton’s carcass, one and all, yet they refuse anything new and unknown as an offense against their dignity. When the winds howl and the food grows scarce, we eat, burn, and cover ourselves in our grudges.”

Brienne’s blue eyes turned round as marbles in her scarred face. “It has been a long Winter for us all,” she said, frowning, as though she hated that nothing would come to her save platitudes. 

Alys had decided some time past that she liked this odd woman, soft-hearted as any southron lady, yet tough as salted sealmeat in the presence of the merest whiff of danger. To people of the North, the lady knight from the Stormlands was neither more nor less suspicious than any Thenn or Skagosi. Brienne of Tarth had earned the North’s abiding gratitude as well as its shamed resentment, for she had been Sansa Stark’s protector and sworn shield when no northerner could have got within ten leagues of Eddard Stark’s daughter. The North did not like to owe anyone. 

That reminded Alys. “Did the raven bring _you_ any news from the south?” she asked slyly.

The last scion of House Karstark had good cause to hate the remaining Lannisters, and though the Kingslayer had helped bring the last Stark safely home, that had not been enough to earn him more than a grudging welcome at Winterfell. Too many northerners’ blood had flown under the bridge for that. Jaime Lannister had gone south as soon as the Kingsroad had opened at Winter’s end, to sort out what remained of his wretched family. 

Brienne chewed her answer to bits before she opened her mouth at last. “Ser Jaime is well. His... son is well.” She chewed her words some more. “He was negotiating safe passage through the Neck when the raven flew.”

Alys did not bother to keep the tartness from her tone, though it was vinegar rather than venom. She really _was_ rather fond of Brienne. “There’ll be one person glad to have him back, at least. You must be weary of having the coldest bed in Winterfell.”

Brienne kept her eyes on the men shouting and shoving each other in the yard. She turned a brighter shade of red than the Spring air warranted. “It is not like that between us,” she gritted out wearily. 

_Not yet_ , Alys thought, _or the Kingslayer must hanker after a dagger between his shoulder blades and a quiet tumble to the ditch bellow Winterfell’s walls._ Those were like to be the only rewards he got for protecting Lady Stark, unless Brienne started making the woman’s choices she obviously wanted to make, behind the stiff kirtle of her honor. 

“Go back beyond the Wall, if you miss it so much, whoreson!” 

“You should know, your mother was the hungriest whore I ever met in the silky south!” 

“I’ll feed you your own teeth, see if that’ll sate you…”

In the yard, the shoving and shouting degenerated at last into a fistfight. How fortunate, Alys recalled, that the new rule for when more than one House visited Winterfell stated that only men and women of House Stark may carry swords and daggers longer than a handspan within its walls. 

Two bodies landed in the thawed mud with a loud splash, the felled man moaning through broken teeth, his opponent attempting to crush his windpipe as they wrestled. A raucous crowd of northerners, stranded men of the Stormlands, and free folk formed a triple ring around the combatants, who heaved and pushed back and forth, feet sliding on muddy cobblestones, as unlikely to win a decisive victory or rout the foe for good as the men they had once followed had been.

Brienne snorted loudly, shook her head. She removed her hand from her sword’s pommel and crossed her arms over her chest, the picture of neutrality. She must have remembered Sansa’s no-blades-within-walls rule as well. 

Wind from the east whistled over the battlements, stinging the women’s cheeks like the lick of an ice dragon’s tongue. Alys made a face, while Brienne uttered a small sound of discontent and hunched inside her fur jacket.

Alys nudged Brienne as she rearranged her bear pelt to cover the lower half of her face. “I will tell you something,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper, “but you must promise not to tell my husband.”

Brienne adopted a wary expression. 

“It will not bring you dishonor, I promise.” 

If the southron realized that Alys was laughing at her a little, she was too proud or too shy to say so. “I promise not to tell the Magnar,” Brienne said solemnly.

“My father was fond of a saying he learned from his father, who’d learned it from his father, and so on down the line of Karstarks. _A northerner is not someone who does not feel the cold, a northerner is someone who is warmly dressed._ ” 

Brienne’s laugh was inelegant and hearty – a true northern laugh.

Alys grinned. “I thought I knew what that meant. Karhold gets even colder than most northern keeps, with the winds off the Shivering Sea. That was until the Magnar took me beyond the Frostfangs, to present me to the gods of his people. By all the gods, his and mine, I never thought such cold was possible! They say some of my husband’s people mated with giants and bears, once upon a time, and I believe they did, if it kept them warm.” 

Brienne was too kind to say anything reproachful, but Alys did not miss the look the tall woman darted her way. She smiled, a silent apology to her husband and a world in which Alys had come to see the North of her girlhood as one with the spoiled and pampered south – the only North she recognized now were the lands where protection did not mean a Wall, a lord’s word, or a king’s law, but only what its people would lend to each other.

“His people, and mine,” Alys acknowledged her lapse. “We all live with a foot in two worlds, now.” 

Brienne’s nod was slow in coming, final when it did come.


End file.
